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When you hear the term “visual aid,” does it make you think of a film projector, poster, or dry erase board? Well, we’re talking websites here, not your high school history class or low-budget work conference. The more modern term for visual aids is multimedia, but they mean the same thing: Your website needs stuff for people to look at, and Google knows and likes it when you use images and videos.

The Benefits of Multimedia

You want to be at the top of search engine results. Google wants your site to have quality content. Seems like a pretty easy formula to get your website where you want it to be – but “quality content” doesn’t only refer to text. While blog writing and thoughtfully composed service pages are crucial to achieving the search engine rankings you want, the visual goods also play an important role in your Google report card.

It’s not especially helpful if you throw a hodge-podge of images up on your site. If your website is managed through a WordPress platform (and if it’s not, you should reconsider), every page and post has a built-in SEO area for keyword, title, and meta description. But each image that is uploaded also has a spot reserved for its own title, caption, alt text, and description. These are the sorts of elements that Google trolls through to see if you’re fulfilling their requirements. Attaching text to your images is a boon to your search engine optimization efforts.

Enhance Web Content with Visual Media

Multimedia is often what convinces your site visitors to stick around too. For readers to understand what your site is offering, visual aids are essential to your website design. Think about it: Magazines, text books, and journals, for example, all offer visual media to help explain the topic in question. And aren’t you more interested in an article or story or blog post when it has accompanying multimedia, whether that’s a still image, interactive content (a graph that can change its display with one click of the mouse or even a quiz), video, or infographic? Multimedia certainly makes a topic easier to understand and – when you don’t have time to read the accompanying text – offers at least some insight into the topic at hand.

Website readers are seeking information in alternative formats to text. After all, with smartphone and tablet usage – and tiny screens – it can sometimes be easier to watch an informative or instructional video than squint to read small text. An infographic with statistics or visual explanations is kind to the site visitors who may not have time to read a document stating the same information.

Ultimately, the goal is produce pages that are chock full of quality content, in a variety of formats. Can’t begin to fathom what kind of multimedia could accompany your website? Contact Pistonbroke and we’ll caucus.